Comment by 2001zhaozhao
1 month ago
I agree, quality of decisions will be much better than quantity. I'm trying to keep decision quality constant here
A lot of the above assumptions are just to keep things fair since in the real world there are a lot of variables that can't be ignored. For example, keeping AI competence equal between the two companies.
I'm just trying to show that under my assumptions (~2027-28 AI, highly competent) it is quite conceivable that a 4-person visionary company can start a beat a much larger traditional one on quantity, not that it will definitely happen. I guess it's even rougher than the "rough math" I said it is.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is this: startups have always been able to beat big companies in serial execution speeds, but beating them in straight-up parallel work quantity is very unusual, but I think there's a good chance it will happen. This is simply because decision-making scales really poorly in traditional companies by headcount and I think it'll get more and more important relative to implementation work. Hence the focus on quantity of "deliverables" (i really mean medium-size project designs, think equivalent to 5-day targets for a dev team which I assume to be AI's average task horizon before it needs human decision input)
At least, the small team will win for some time until we get straight-up superintelligence that replaces the decision-makers as well. At which point the calculus suddenly flips and the richest company wins by default.
Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree assuming those assumptions end up being true. It just wasn't really the point I was trying to make. More about the mentality that you need to keep up with the proverbial Joneses and even sacrifice other things in order to do so, or else you will be left behind. You see this on threads where people are talking about their own personal development as well. Fears about being left behind, or people warning others that if they don't go all-in on agentic development they will be left behind. It just feels so oversimplified, almost philosophically empty.
I can understand fears about employment of course, people need money to live and support their loved ones, but beyond this there is more to life than just slopping out more and more code that "does things" and it's worth considering if there is any real benefit to do so, or even if the negative aspects outweigh the positive ones. I suppose we will find out in real time if everyone's side projects are better to be left unfinished, or finished by vibe coding. It's not so clear to me.
I'm not advocating for not utilising LLM's in companies or whatever, just that prioritising velocity at the expense of everything else might not be so valuable. Of course if there are no downsides than it would be purely valuable, but that basically begs the question lol.